Fox, iHeart Execs Reveal Secrets Behind ‘Living Room Concert’ Performances (EXCLUSIVE)

As recently as last Tuesday, just three artists had signed on to “Fox Presents the iHeart Living Room Concert for America.” But after a week of scrambling and all-night editing sessions, the producers and executives behind the special managed to put together a one-hour event on Sunday night that attracted at least 5.5 million viewers, and has so far raised more than $8 million.

It was a lo-fi production that producer Joel Gallen and the teams led by Fox Alternative Entertainment president Rob Wade, iHeart Media president of entertainment enterprises John Sykes and iHeart Media national programming president Tom Poleman managed to splice into a broadcast-quality telecast.

Elton John hosted the “Living Room Concert for America,” with his husband, David Furnish, shooting him via iPhone. Other performers included Backstreet Boys, who crooned their signature song “I Want It That Way” from five different locations; Dave Grohl, who performed from Hawaii; Billie Eilish and her producer brother, Finneas; Shawn Mendes and Camila Cabello, collaborating from home in Miami; Tim McGraw, singing from his outdoor pool diving board; and Mariah Carey, belting out “Always Be My Baby” from her New York home studio.

“I wouldn’t have guessed ten days ago that we’d be putting on a concert in primetime with no planning and no notice and pulled it off that way,” said Fox Entertainment CEO Charlie Collier. “This is a moment where bringing people together, if we can do it, is really important.”

Originally, Fox was scheduled to air the “iHeartRadio Music Awards” on Sunday night from the Shrine Auditorium in Downtown Los Angeles. That event was canceled earlier this month as it became apparent that, due to the spread of the coronavirus pandemic, public gatherings would be halted.

After that, two weeks ago, Wade and Sykes began discussing the idea of creating a special from the living rooms of artists — but were hesitant at first, given the uncertain mood of the nation. “I was not sure if this was the right tone,” Wade said. “Will people forgive the quality of those performances and how we’re going to give performances? Is it going to be the right thing to do this show? We decided no, it wasn’t at that point. That was two weeks ago on Sunday. It just didn’t feel quite right.

“And then, in the space of two days, it did,” he added. “It changed so quick. It was also this idea that we could do some good. You have a huge broadcast platform like Fox, and you have a huge national radio platform like iHeart. We’ve got a bit of an obligation here as well. [It] isn’t just, like, ‘oh, we want to make this show.’ It was like, ‘what can we do?’”

Sykes said the idea was to offer a night of entertainment, but also highlight the health care workers, firefighters and emergency medical professionals on the front line. “These are doctors who are sleeping in their garage so they don’t infect their families,” Sykes said. “People are making masks on their sewing machines and in Tennessee. We wanted to shine a light on those heroes.”

The next step was convincing artists to sign on — not an easy task at first, especially when many of these performers are adjusting to their own new at-home realities. And of course, there was the question of how the amateur video might look and sound on TV.

“I think the biggest part of the communication to the celebrities was [saying], ‘look guys, you’re going to sound good, and you’re going to look good,’” Wade said. “And you’re going to do good as well, because obviously there’s a sensitivity to getting the tone right. To get the tone right and to convince people that this is the right thing to do was difficult.”

Added Sykes: “Once they heard that we were going to respect their safety and not send a crew of ten into their apartments or their homes — that we were going to respect that they were following protocol — they relaxed and said, ‘this is going to be a great thing.’ They’re at home, and they want to get their music out and they can’t play live.”

“Living Room Concert for America” aired on 800 of iHeart’s 880 radio stations and across all of Fox Corp.’s networks. That includes Fox News, which has notably drawn criticism for downplaying the pandemic in its early days (and continues to parrot White House talking points). But nonetheless, Collier said Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch championed the special.

“Lachlan saw the importance of the benefit and told us to run with it,” he said. “It ran on every property we have, including Sports and Deportes and truly this was from the top down. Lachlan saw this opportunity and it was produced in entertainment but every division stepped up and promoted the hell out of it and aired it.”

YouTube has streaming rights to “Living Room Concert for America” for the next three days, and the special will also continue to live on Fox’s VOD platforms. With the additional online exposure, the producers hope to continue to raise money for the two charitable foundations chosen for the show: Feeding America and First Responders Children’s Foundation.

Here are a few more behind-the-scenes tidbits about Sunday night’s special:

Most of the special was shot on iPhones.

Sykes said Apple assisted Gallen in finding ways to experiment with iPhone cameras to make the special more broadcast-ready.

“We actually found that these iPhone cameras could look like a Super Bowl camera if they’re programmed the right way,” he said. “It’s a leap of faith when an artist goes, ‘I’m going to go on national television, and you’re going to shoot me with an iPhone,’ because we have to do business with these artists 365 days a year. The fact that they all came back and said ‘I love the quality, I looked good and I sounded good,’ it galvanized the relationship.”

Gallen, Fox and iHeart relied on the artists’ friends and family members to shoot the performances. In some cases, several of their iPhones were set up at different angles, and several takes were recorded. That way, Gallen’s editors were able to pick the best angles and produce performances that looked polished. (The goal, they said, was to improve on the static Instagram Live mini-concerts that have become in vogue the past few weeks).

This required plenty of back-and-forth with producers. “The legalities of doing performances and making sure the words are right, that there’s no cussing, and there’s no branding or a piece of artwork in the background that’s not cleared… it goes beyond just pointing and shooting,” Wade said. “It’s when you’re doing all this remotely that makes it incredibly difficult.”

In some cases, equipment like microphones were shipping to artists. In other cases, it was simple: Grohl’s Hawaii house is next door to his album producer, which made finding equipment easy.

“It was strokes of luck like that, but [there were cases like] Camila and Shawn, who are just in their house in Miami, and they’re like, ‘it’s just the two of us, we got a couple of iPhones, how do we do this?’” Wade said. “And they’ve got no filmmaking experience. So each performance had its own challenge.”

Added Sykes: “A lot of artists were watching this on Sunday because this is, at least for the time being, the new normal of how we’re going to produce things, and how artists are going to get exposed as they’re trapped in their homes like everyone else.”

Elton John volunteered to host because he doesn’t have a proper piano where he’s currently living.

Originally, Fox and iHeart were in talks with an unnamed comedian to host the special. But when that fell through, it so happened that John was interested in participating — but didn’t have a piano in the house where he, Furnish and their family are currently living. John instead volunteered to host (although in the end, used one of his kids’ keyboard to play).

Elton John’s husband did such a good job filming that he got a segment producer credit.

“I have one of my favorite emails of all time from David Furnish, where he’s relaying to the showrunners the different camera angles that he took and the sound quality. It was basically the kind of email you’d normally get from a field producer,” Wade said. “He was like the cameraman, producer and director of that whole thing, but it’s David Furnish! I didn’t know he was going to get a segment producer credit but that was in the end.”

Mariah Carey juggled taping her performance while watching her kids.

“Mariah Carey has two kids, and obviously no one has any help right now because of the virus. You want just have your family around,” Sykes said. “So she had to actually keep the door of her studio in her apartment open, while she watched her kids as she sang.”

This is still Mariah Carey, however, so viewers may have noticed the front of her hair blowing a bit: it turns out she has a little fan on her to add to the performance.

The execs said those at-home touches were a hallmark of the special: McGraw singing as his dogs were running around his pool; ditto Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong, whose audio was punctuated by the jingle of his dog’s identification tags. “You saw in Kevin from the Backstreet Boys, his kids were running around, so you just saw these real-life stories we had to basically work around because they were just doing it all themselves,” Sykes noted.

The Backstreet Boys’ performance initially sounded too good for the special.

Sykes credits Gallen for editing the five boy banders into a cohesive piece. For viewers who thought it sounded a bit too good for a video shot in five different chunks, “it was actually too good we heard the first tape,” Sykes said. “That’s how well they did it. So we actually had to bring up the voices in their rooms so people knew that they were really singing. This band is so good and so well rehearsed. Each artist shot their scene and it was synced up, and then the editor cut in their part of the song.”

The special was also inspired by MTV’s “Unplugged” series.

Sykes was an MTV executive during the heyday of “MTV Unplugged,” “where we took an artist off a big, powerful stage and put them in an intimate setting, still high quality, and you just connected in a whole different way because television is an intimate medium,” he said. “Just seeing the way Billie Eilish sings in every moment. There’s no amplification to compete with it.”

The special was locked less than five hours before air.

“I kept saying to Rob, ‘can we have another three hours?’” said Sykes, who added that no one slept Saturday night as they raced to finish the special.

Said Wade: “A really big team of people did this, on the iHeart side, Joel Gallen, our marketing teams, our legal teams. The artists themselves, and Elton… we did this I feel for the right reasons, of trying to raise some awareness, trying to help some people, and at the same time I’m glad we could entertain people, which is important as well.”

This production was of the moment, but Wade hesitates to call it a new normal.

“People are still going to hanker to have celebrities and to have performances at a high quality,” Wade said. “We will undoubtedly come out of this period with new learnings and new production techniques, which will be more efficient probably both in the way we film it and then the financial way we film stuff… I think the key is you should have a very high standards in whatever TV production you’re doing. You’ve got to make iPhone footage look amazing, and you can.”